A family of five move from Australia to Argentina trying to blend in like locals. The kids are learning Spanish, he's teaching English and she's doing a psychology degree. Sounds like fun to me.

Sunday, 23 April 2017

Are these for sale?

Many areas in South America have plastic and glass bottles
that are reusable.A bottle of soft
drink in a retornable bottle is generally
30 pesos.When you return the bottle you
are given 10 pesos off the price of the bottle you are buying.You can’t take three empty bottles in and
receive a free bottle of soft drink – it’s one for one.I think the owner of the corner store was
stuck in a rut.I had one returnable
bottle and was buying two new bottles of soft drink.

You have two bottles but you’ve only
returned one.

Yes.

Are you going to put one bottle back on the
shelf?

No I want to buy both of them.

But you have only returned one bottle.

Yes and I want to buy this one in exchange for the empty one
and this one for full price.

(Frustrated) Arrh – you don’t understand.

I understand you.I’m
returning one bottle and buying two.

Do you have another empty bottle?

Did you take lessons from Basil Fawlty?

She called the lady over from the veggie section for
reinforcements and tried to explain how I didn’t understand the process.I retold my story and the veggie lady was as
dumbfounded as I was.She told the lady
on the checkout that I wanted to buy two bottles of soft drink.Eventually my radical plan was understood and
I was allowed to leave.I may have
thrown her world off its axis by a few degrees.

All the schools in 9 de Julio run a split shift system.Children either attend classes in the morning
from 8-12 or the afternoon from 1-5.This means that the majority of children in 9 de Julio don’t even get to have lunch together. Our
school has a completely different model where they do curriculum in the morning
and extra curriculum in the afternoon.The afternoon activities
consist of music, sport, English, vegetable gardening and literary workshops.Truce came home and said she needed a kilo of
rice, an old sock, some rope and duct tape for an afternoon workshop.The plot thickens.Was there a kidnapping workshop we had
mistranslated?The children are making
their own hammers to learn how to hammer throw.If we’d known that we would have bought long grain rice for an unfair
advantage.